I inadvertently posted my Clarification on Royal Enfield Twin engine numbers before I had quite finished it. This occured whilst editing the header, resulting in the typo in it - sorry about that.

If you haven't read the earlier posting, please do do so first, as otherwise what is written below may not make sense.

Attached to this posting a photo of the front of the same engine pictured in the previous one. It is from a relatively early 700cc Meteor sent to South Africa in October 1953. As the frame numbers started at 101, this theoretically makes it number 1002 off the production line. No guarantee that they were built in frame number order though!!!

You will see that this engine has a "true" number of W7 1045 and gearbox number of HCT 417 stamped on the front.The photo on my previous posting shows the Redditch number of T7 1103 on the left side case.The frame number of this machine is T 1103 and it still has the correct gearbox.

Please note that there is no correlation between the front engine number stamped at Greenland Mills and the one on the side stamped at Redditch to "pair" it to the frame. The engine/gearbox assemblies were obviously supplied to Redditch in batches and then they were picked at random for fitting to frames.

All my ramblings regarding number stamping in the earlier posting are based on what should have happened, and do not take into account any inconsistancies or errors made at the time. If a frame or engine was mis-stamped, it remained that way, as any attempt at correction could subsequently appear to be tampering. This sometimes leads to there being two of the same model with the same frame and/or engine numbers.